Nobody Is Ever Missing

Books | Fiction / Literary

3.3

Catherine Lacey

In the spirit of Haruki Murakami and Amelia Gray, Catherine Lacey's Nobody Is Ever Missing is full of mordant humor and uncanny insights, as Elyria waffles between obsession and numbness in the face of love, loss, danger, and self-knowledge. Without telling her family, Elyria takes a one-way flight to New Zealand, abruptly leaving her stable but unfulfilling life in Manhattan. As her husband scrambles to figure out what happened to her, Elyria hurtles into the unknown, testing fate by hitchhiking, tacitly being swept into the lives of strangers, and sleeping in fields, forests, and public parks.Her risky and often surreal encounters with the people and wildlife of New Zealand propel Elyria deeper into her deteriorating mind. Haunted by her sister's death and consumed by an inner violence, her growing rage remains so expertly concealed that those who meet her sense nothing unwell. This discord between her inner and outer reality leads her to another obsession: If her truest self is invisible and unknowable to others, is she even alive?The risks Elyria takes on her journey are paralleled by the risks Catherine Lacey takes on the page. In urgent, spiraling prose she whittles away at the rage within Elyria and exposes the very real, very knowable anxiety of the human condition. And yet somehow Lacey manages to poke fun at her unrelenting self-consciousness, her high-stakes search for the dark heart of the self.

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More Details:

Author

Catherine Lacey

Pages

256

Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published Date

2014-07-08

ISBN

0374711283 9780374711283

Community ReviewsSee all

"I had to struggle to finish this book... I discovered the writing style to be chaotic and hard to follow. Elyria finds herself lost in her own mind, because of this internal chaos. I feel that it is reflected in the writing, but so much that you get lost in the words. After her sister's suicide, she becomes stuck on Ruby's last moments, thoughts, and interactions. Her husband was a professor to Ruby and is how Elyria and he met. Her relationship with her mother is filled with misunderstanding and lack of care, on both individuals. She drinks and smokes, while seeming just as lost as her daughter.<br/><br/>Elyria takes it upon herself to leave her husband without a word of where she really is going. She travels across the world to New Zealand in hopes that she can lose herself in the country and find a place where she is with people, but alone.<br/><br/>The plot does not possess a storyline easy to follow and leaves us with more questions than when we started the book. I give this a 2 star rating for the difficulty of reading the text and understanding the point behind Elyria's story. Realizing how emotionally distressed and lost she is important, but there really appears to have no "point" to this book. I don't normally have this harsh of an opinion, but I really would suggest that this book should be left on the shelf if you have other interests on your #TBR list."